Abstract

Immediately after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the netizens reacted and participated in the disaster response in many ways. This work examined a popular Chinese discussion forum during the first week after the earthquake, adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A new message classification scheme was developed to categorize 2,266 discussion threads posted to the forum. Four important roles played by the forum were identified and further examined. Design implications for disaster response systems were drawn.

Copyright 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.